No. 503.

SATTIGUMBA-JATAKA.

"With, a great host," etc.--This story the Master told while sojourning in the deer-park Maddakucchi, about Devadatta. When Devadatta threw the stone , and a fragment pierced the Blessed One's foot, there was great pain in it. Numbers of the Brethren gathered to see the Tathagata. Now when the Blessed One saw the people gathered together, he said to them, "Brethren, this place is crowded: there will be a great gathering. Come now, carry me in

a litter to Maddakucchi." So then the Brethren did. Jivaka made the Tathagata's foot well. The Brethren sitting before the Master talked of it: "Sirs, a sinner is Devadatta and sinners are all his people; the sinner keeps company with the sinful." The Master asked, "What do ye talk of, Brethren?" They told him. Said he, "It has been so before, and this is not the first time Devadatta the sinner has kept sinful company." Then he told them a story of the past.

Once upon a time, a king named Pancala reigned in the city of Uttara-Pancala. The Great Being was born as the son of the king of the Parrots, in a grove of silk-cotton trees which grew on a high table-land in the heart of a forest: there were two brothers. Up wind from this hill was a robber village, where five hundred robbers dwelt: under its lee was a hermitage with five hundred sages.

About the time when the parrots were moulting came a whirlwind that carried off one of the parrots, [431] and he fell in the robber village among the robbers' weapons: and because he fell there, they called him Sattigumba, or Bristling Spears. The other parrot fell in the hermitage, among the flowers which grew on a sandy spot, from which cause he was named Pupphaka, the Flower-bird. Sattigumba grew up amongst the robbers, Pupphaka with the sages.